Recognizing Predictive Substructures with Subgraph Information Bottleneck

The emergence of Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) has greatly boosted the progress of graph learning. However, two disturbing factors, noise and redundancy in graph data, and lack of interpretation for prediction results, impede further development of GCN. One solution is to recognize a predictive yet compressed subgraph to get rid of the noise and redundancy and obtain the interpretable part of the graph. This setting of subgraph is similar to the information bottleneck (IB) principle, which is less studied on graph-structured data and GCN. Inspired by the IB principle, we propose a novel subgraph information bottleneck (SIB) framework to recognize such subgraphs, named IB-subgraph. However, the intractability of mutual information and the discrete nature of graph data makes the objective of SIB notoriously hard to optimize. To this end, we introduce a bilevel optimization scheme coupled with a mutual information estimator for irregular graphs. Moreover, we propose a continuous relaxation for subgraph selection with a connectivity loss for stabilization. We further theoretically prove the error bound of our estimation scheme for mutual information and the noise-invariant nature of IB-subgraph. Extensive experiments on graph learning and large-scale point cloud tasks demonstrate the superior property of IB-subgraph.

Diversified Multiscale Graph Learning with Graph Self-Correction

Though the multiscale graph learning techniques have enabled advanced feature extraction frameworks, the classic ensemble strategy may show inferior performance while encountering the high homogeneity of the learnt representation, which is caused by the nature of existing graph pooling methods. To cope with this issue, we propose a diversified multiscale graph learning model equipped with two core ingredients: a graph self-correction (GSC) mechanism to generate informative embedded graphs, and a diversity boosting regularizer (DBR) to achieve a comprehensive characterization of the input graph. The proposed GSC mechanism compensates the pooled graph with the lost information during the graph pooling process by feeding back the estimated residual graph, which serves as a plug-in component for popular graph pooling methods. Meanwhile, pooling methods enhanced with the GSC procedure encourage the discrepancy of node embeddings, and thus it contributes to the success of ensemble learning strategy. The proposed DBR instead enhances the ensemble diversity at the graph-level embeddings by leveraging the interaction among individual classifiers. Extensive experiments on popular graph classification benchmarks show that the proposed GSC mechanism leads to significant improvements over state-of-the-art graph pooling methods. Moreover, the ensemble multiscale graph learning models achieve superior enhancement by combining both GSC and DBR.

Learning Diverse-Structured Networks for Adversarial Robustness

In adversarial training (AT), the main focus has been the objective and optimizer while the model has been less studied, so that the models being used are still those classic ones in standard training (ST). Classic network architectures (NAs) are generally worse than searched NAs in ST, which should be the same in AT. In this paper, we argue that NA and AT cannot be handled independently, since given a dataset, the optimal NA in ST would be no longer optimal in AT. That being said, AT is time-consuming itself; if we directly search NAs in AT over large search spaces, the computation will be practically infeasible. Thus, we propose a diverse-structured network (DS-Net), to significantly reduce the size of the search space: instead of low-level operations, we only consider predefined atomic blocks, where an atomic block is a time-tested building block like the residual block. There are only a few atomic blocks and thus we can weight all atomic blocks rather than find the best one in a searched block of DS-Net, which is an essential trade-off between exploring diverse structures and exploiting the best structures. Empirical results demonstrate the advantages of DS-Net, i.e., weighting the atomic blocks.

Chasing the Tail in Monocular 3D Human Reconstruction with Prototype Memory

Deep neural networks have achieved great progress in single-image 3D human reconstruction. However, existing methods still fall short in predicting rare poses. The reason is that most of the current models perform regression based on a single human prototype, which is similar to common poses while far from the rare poses. In this work, we 1) identify and analyze this learning obstacle and 2) propose a prototype memory-augmented network, PM-Net, that effectively improves performances of predicting rare poses. The core of our framework is a memory module that learns and stores a set of 3D human prototypes capturing local distributions for either common poses or rare poses. With this formulation, the regression starts from a better initialization, which is relatively easier to converge. Extensive experiments on several widely employed datasets demonstrate the proposed framework's effectiveness compared to other state-of-the-art methods. Notably, our approach significantly improves the models' performances on rare poses while generating comparable results on other samples.

Hierarchical Graph Capsule Network

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) draw their strength from explicitly modeling the topological information of structured data. However, existing GNNs suffer from limited capability in capturing the hierarchical graph representation which plays an important role in graph classification. In this paper, we innovatively propose hierarchical graph capsule network (HGCN) that can jointly learn node embeddings and extract graph hierarchies. Specifically, disentangled graph capsules are established by identifying heterogeneous factors underlying each node, such that their instantiation parameters represent different properties of the same entity. To learn the hierarchical representation, HGCN characterizes the part-whole relationship between lower-level capsules (part) and higher-level capsules (whole) by explicitly considering the structure information among the parts. Experimental studies demonstrate the effectiveness of HGCN and the contribution of each component.

Deep Multimodal Fusion by Channel Exchanging

Deep multimodal fusion by using multiple sources of data for classification or regression has exhibited a clear advantage over the unimodal counterpart on various applications. Yet, current methods including aggregation-based and alignment-based fusion are still inadequate in balancing the trade-off between inter-modal fusion and intra-modal processing, incurring a bottleneck of performance improvement. To this end, this paper proposes Channel-Exchanging-Network (CEN), a parameter-free multimodal fusion framework that dynamically exchanges channels between sub-networks of different modalities. Specifically, the channel exchanging process is self-guided by individual channel importance that is measured by the magnitude of Batch-Normalization (BN) scaling factor during training. The validity of such exchanging process is also guaranteed by sharing convolutional filters yet keeping separate BN layers across modalities, which, as an add-on benefit, allows our multimodal architecture to be almost as compact as a unimodal network. Extensive experiments on semantic segmentation via RGB-D data and image translation through multi-domain input verify the effectiveness of our CEN compared to current state-of-the-art methods. Detailed ablation studies have also been carried out, which provably affirm the advantage of each component we propose. Our code is available at https://github.com/yikaiw/CEN.

On Self-Distilling Graph Neural Network

Recently, the teacher-student knowledge distillation framework has demonstrated its potential in training Graph Neural Networks (GNNs). However, due to the difficulty of training deep and wide GNN models, one can not always obtain a satisfactory teacher model for distillation. Furthermore, the inefficient training process of teacher-student knowledge distillation also impedes its applications in GNN models. In this paper, we propose the first teacher-free knowledge distillation framework for GNNs, termed GNN Self-Distillation (GNN-SD), that serves as a drop-in replacement for improving the training process of GNNs.We design three knowledge sources for GNN-SD: neighborhood discrepancy rate (NDR), compact graph embedding and intermediate logits. Notably, serving as a metric of the non-smoothness of the embedded graph, NDR empowers the transferability of knowledge that maintains high neighborhood discrepancy by enforcing consistency between consecutive GNN layers. We conduct exploring analysis to verify that our framework could improve the training dynamics and embedding quality of GNNs. Extensive experiments on various popular GNN models and datasets demonstrate that our approach obtains consistent and considerable performance enhancement, proving its effectiveness and generalization ability.

Graph Information Bottleneck for Subgraph Recognition

Given the input graph and its label/property, several key problems of graph learning, such as finding interpretable subgraphs, graph denoising and graph compression, can be attributed to the fundamental problem of recognizing a subgraph of the original one. This subgraph shall be as informative as possible, yet contains less redundant and noisy structure. This problem setting is closely related to the well-known information bottleneck (IB) principle, which, however, has less been studied for the irregular graph data and graph neural networks (GNNs). In this paper, we propose a framework of Graph Information Bottleneck (GIB) for the subgraph recognition problem in deep graph learning. Under this framework, one can recognize the maximally informative yet compressive subgraph, named IB-subgraph. However, the GIB objective is notoriously hard to optimize, mostly due to the intractability of the mutual information of irregular graph data and the unstable optimization process. In order to tackle these challenges, we propose: i) a GIB objective based-on a mutual information estimator for the irregular graph data; ii) a bi-level optimization scheme to maximize the GIB objective; iii) a connectivity loss to stabilize the optimization process. We evaluate the properties of the IB-subgraph in three application scenarios: improvement of graph classification, graph interpretation and graph denoising. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the information-theoretic IB-subgraph enjoys superior graph properties.

Tackling Over-Smoothing for General Graph Convolutional Networks

Increasing the depth of GCN, which is expected to permit more expressivity, is shown to incur performance detriment especially on node classification. The main cause of this lies in over-smoothing. The over-smoothing issue drives the output of GCN towards a space that contains limited distinguished information among nodes, leading to poor expressivity. Several works on refining the architecture of deep GCN have been proposed, but it is still unknown in theory whether or not these refinements are able to relieve over-smoothing. In this paper, we first theoretically analyze how general GCNs act with the increase in depth, including generic GCN, GCN with bias, ResGCN, and APPNP. We find that all these models are characterized by a universal process: all nodes converging to a cuboid. Upon this theorem, we propose DropEdge to alleviate over-smoothing by randomly removing a certain number of edges at each training epoch. Theoretically, DropEdge either reduces the convergence speed of over-smoothing or relieves the information loss caused by dimension collapse. Experimental evaluations on simulated dataset have visualized the difference in over-smoothing between different GCNs. Moreover, extensive experiments on several real benchmarks support that DropEdge consistently improves the performance on a variety of both shallow and deep GCNs.